Holmes & Co. is a Blog for Independent Minds, a place for a free-flowing discussion of politics, policy, news and opinion

The virtue of restraint

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About this blog

Holmes & Co. is a Blog for Independent Minds, a place for a free-flowing discussion of politics, policy, news and opinion.
This blog is the online cousin of the Opinion section of the MetroWest Daily News. As such, our focus starts in the
...

Holmes & Co. is a Blog for Independent Minds, a place for a free-flowing discussion of politics, policy, news and opinion.
This blog is the online cousin of the Opinion section of the MetroWest Daily News. As such, our focus starts in the MetroWest/495 area and spreads from there to include Massachusetts, the nation and the world. You'll also find here lots of cross-referencing to columns and editorials in the MetroWest Daily News.

The blog presents an opportunity for readers to comment directly and immediately on pieces that appear on the print pages.

In my column last Sunday, I wrote of the “Uncle Sam knows best” mentality that has achieved little but failure in a century of Middle East interventions. Strategic retreat is often ugly – as Obama has demonstrated – but when going forward is likely to do more harm than good, advancing to the rear makes sense.

Obama’s foreign policy repositioning is consistent with what he has long promised – to avoid “dumb wars,” to wind down U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, to use diplomacy and development rather than relying on the military for problem-solving overseas – but it has still seemed improvised. A new book proposes a theory to guide U.S. foreign policy in a world where “liberal hegemony” – the theory that the world’s sole superpower could reshape other countries in its own image – has been discredited.

I haven’t read “Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy,” by MIT prof Bernard Posen, but I did see Posen interviewed Monday by Jim Braude on Broadside, which you can watch here. It’s somewhat encouraging that Posen says mid-level officials in the Pentagon and foreign policy establishment seem to welcome his ideas, but discouraging that he couldn’t name a single elected official who seems to get it. But new thinking has to start somewhere.